The Queen's Lover

Summary (from the publisher): Francine du Plessix Gray’s beautifully realized historical novel reveals the untold love story between Swedish aristocrat Count Axel von Fersen and Marie Antoinette. The romance begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the dashing nobleman first meets the mesmerizing nineteen-year-old dauphine, wife of the reclusive prince who will soon become Louis XVI. This electric encounter launches a love affair that will span the course of the French Revolution.

As their relationship deepens, Fersen becomes a devoted companion to the entire royal family. Roaming the halls of Versailles and visiting the private haven of Le Petit Trianon, he discovers the deepest secrets of the court, even learning the startling erotic details of Marie Antoinette’s marriage to Louis XVI. But his new intimacy with Marie Antoinette and her family is disrupted when the events of the American Revolution tear Fersen away. Moved by the cause, he joins French troops in the fight for American independence.

He returns to find France on the brink of disintegration. After the Revolution of 1789 the royal family is moved from Versailles to the Tuileries. Fersen devises an escape for the family and their young children (Marie-Thérèse and the dauphin—whom many suspect is in fact Fersen’s son). The failed attempt leads to a more grueling imprisonment, and the family spends its excruciating final days captive before the king and queen face the guillotine.

Grieving his lost love in his native Sweden, Fersen begins to sense the effects of the French Revolution in his homeland. Royalists are now targets, and the sensuous aristocratic world of his youth is fast vanishing. Fersen is incapable of realizing that centuries of tradition have disappeared, and he pays dearly for his naïveté, losing his life at the hands of a savage mob that views him as a pivotal member of the ruling class.

Scion of Sweden’s most esteemed nobility, Fersen came to be seen as an enemy of the country he loved. His fate is symbolic of the violent speed with which the events of the eighteenth century transformed European culture. Expertly researched and deeply imagined, The Queen’s Lover is a fresh vision of the French Revolution and the French royal family as told through the love story that was at its center.  

 

Review: Told from the perspective of Swedish aristocrat Count Axel von Fersen, this novel follows Axel as he write his memoirs that focus on his love affair with Marie Antoinette. In alternating chapters, Axel's sister Sophie fills in the gaps in Axel's story after his death.

 

I was excited to read this novel as I knew little about the historical figure of von Fersen and thought that his story would provide a unique perspective of Marie Antoinette. However, I was gravely disappointed in the execution of this novel. Rather than an intimate tale of friendship and love between the count and the French royal couple, this is a stilted book that relies far too much on telling rather than showing. The novel would have been more successful if it had focused on the times when Axel and Marie Antoinette were actually together. Instead, it skips quickly over their love affair and mostly consists of Axel relaying her grisly end as relayed to him by others who actually witnessed her final months. For example, the scene of Axel and Marie Antoinette's last night together as lovers - which could have been a pivotal moment in the tension of the novel - is dispensed with by Axel saying, "I'm emotionally incapable of sharing the details of our final hours" (149). Indeed, most of the action of this novel occurs at a great distance from the narrator, who merely conveys a third hand account of Marie's final days before her execution.

 

This book suffered from the author's inability to skillfully incorporate historical details and research into the plot. As a result, much of the book reads like a litany of facts encased within the frame story of Axel writing his memoirs before his death. For instance, there is a random chapter that gives a fairly detailed back story on Sweden's ruler Gustavus III that is not really at all relevant to Marie Antoinette and Axel's story other than Gustavus was Axel's king and he knew him personally. This chapter reads like a history lesson rather than a well incorporated part of the narrative. "In 1772 he created a highly progressive constitution that forbade him from declaring war without the consent of the Riksdag" (41).

 

There were times when the language used in Axel's first person narrative struck me as being anachronistic. At one point Axel says that he comes "from a nation in which cleanliness is looked on as being close to you-know-what-ness" (26). It seems far fetched to think someone living in the eighteenth century would have used "you-know-what-ness" rather than the original phrase.

 

The author has an annoying habit of having the first person narrator directly address different characters. For instance, Axel talks about Marie Antoinette as if addressing her personally, "You were also phenomenally uneducated, poor girl; your ignorance was in part traceable to the fact that you were extremely myopic, and for the rest of your life you preferred to be read to in order to acquire most book knowledge" (14). This device fails because of course Marie Antoinette would have known these facts about herself and wouldn't need her friend and lover to fill her in on these obvious details. Furthermore, having Axel's sister Sophie serve as the other narrator for this novel was an inexplicable choice. Although Axel and his sister were close, Sophie never met Marie Antoinette. For a novel whose title proclaims its focus to be on the French queen, this novel tries incredibly hard to remain as far removed from Marie Antoinette as possible.

 

Aside from an original choice of narrator in Count Axel von Fersen and clear evidence of historical research, I found exceedingly little in this novel to recommend it.

 

Stars: 1